Sunday, May 22, 2016

Memory

Memory is weird.  I'm not sure how other people experience memory, but for us it's like snapshots with conceptual information attached to them. Some of the snapshots are in third person view, as in we can see ourself from the outside in our own memory. 


Sometimes we can feel a memory imprinting in the third person while it's happening. I'm not sure if this is a symptom of depersonalization or derealization. I know it's a general dissociative symptom. But sometimes we just think about ourself in the third person. We think we look different than we do and we can see ourself doing whatever we're doing in our mind... as ourself. 


And then there are the times when everything looks washed out and blurry and everything is streaking in our vision. We don't usually remember thighs when it gets like that unless something particularly memorable happened. Like that time one of us smashed our finger in a drawer because they were too dissociated to be coordinated. I have a memory that looks like a blown out photograph of a drawer in our kitchen that's not quite closed. There's a red sort of halo around the image. That's the pain. I know which memory this is even though our hand is nowhere in it. I just see that photograph and know what happened around it. 


It makes us sad sometimes. Because it seems like other people actually remember their lives. Meanwhile, I know that in a week we will hardly remember writing this post. We won't remember what was happening today.  Our days blur together. 


I know this blog doesn't have a lot of traffic right now, but if you read this I'd like to know: how do you remember things?  Whether or not you have DID. What do your memories look like?  I'm curious. 


--Raining Stars


1 comment:

  1. We tend to experience memory more like knowledge or reading a book. In a book you've never seen smelled tasted touched or heard anything that's being written about but you still experience it. Memory for us works very similarly wherein know a thing has happened and how it happened and when it happened but have no real ..experience of having been a part of it happening. There are exceptions and those are usually very similar to the third person memories you described yourself, but more often than not lately it seems like every time we are recalling something that's happened in our past we find ourselves talking and have no real idea where we're pulling those words from... it's like saying the words that are written in the book without having read the book. Just getting lucky that it all makes sense and happens to be written.

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